I’ll be catching up on product announcements of note over the course of the week too.
Flamingo has launched OpenMSP, a platform designed to help Managed Service Providers and Managed Security Service Providers reduce software costs by utilizing open-source tools and artificial intelligence. The market for these service providers is currently valued at $83.76 billion, with commercial software licensing consuming 20-35% of their revenue and technician salaries accounting for another 20-30%. OpenMSP features an AI Margin Increase Report generator that analyzes software usage and provides tailored reports on licensing expenditures and potential savings. The platform includes a vendor mapping directory of 155 commercial vendors and identifies open-source alternatives for roughly 63% of these platforms.
Cloudflare has announced that it will now block known artificial intelligence web crawlers by default, aiming to prevent unauthorized access to online content. This decision is a response to growing concerns among content creators regarding AI companies scraping their material without permission or compensation. The company will require new domain owners to indicate whether they want to permit AI scrapers, introducing a “Pay Per Crawl” program that allows publishers to set fees for AI access to their content. According to Cloudflare, traffic from traditional search engines has dropped significantly, with OpenAI’s tools generating 750 times less traffic than Google, and Anthropic’s models driving an astonishing 30,000 times less.
Cloudflare has introduced end-to-end encryption to its video calling application, Orange Meets, and has made the solution open-source for transparency. This development allows users to explore secure video calling within research or prototyping contexts, with the application initially launched last year as a demo for Cloudflare Calls. Orange Meets employs Messaging Layer Security, an IETF-standardized protocol, to ensure secure group key exchanges and client-side encryption via WebRTC. While this tool is designed for developers and privacy enthusiasts, it is noted that Orange Meets is a technical prototype rather than a fully polished product, lacking the robust features and user-friendliness of established platforms like Zoom or Google Meet.
Speaking of Zoom, Zoom has introduced Realtime Media Streams that provide developers and organizations with secure, real-time access to audio, video, and transcript data from Zoom Meetings. This tool aims to enhance AI-driven applications by transforming live meeting content into structured data streams, allowing teams to gain immediate insights and automate workflows.
TD SYNNEX has acquired Apptium, a software development company and cloud commerce platform provider, to enhance its capabilities in cloud services and everything-as-a-service offerings. Apptium has been a key partner for TD SYNNEX, particularly through its StreamOne platform, which facilitates data-driven decision-making and solutions aggregation for ecosystem partners. The integration of Apptium’s platform-as-a-service model allows companies to implement marketplaces more efficiently, emphasizing configuration over code to accelerate time-to-revenue.
Why do we care?
The message Flamingo is sending is clear: MSPs and MSSPs are losing margins on software licensing (20–35% of revenue) and tech labor (20–30%). Flamingo’s OpenMSP believes that open source combined with AI-driven margin analysis can reduce those costs. MSPs who adopt this approach might position themselves as “independent” of vendor lock-in, appealing to price-sensitive SMBs. However, it could also fragment your tools and complicate support agreements. OpenMSP’s promise may be exaggerated: open-source solutions often lack vendor-level SLAs. MSPs implementing them at scale may sacrifice software savings for increased support costs and client friction.
Your clients’ web content is part of the data AI models are quietly ingesting. Cloudflare’s move gives businesses a lever to control access—or monetize it.
For MSPs: There’s a consultative angle here: helping SMBs decide whether to opt-in for AI crawling or block it. Privacy-conscious industries (legal, healthcare) may want proactive blocks. In the bigger picture: This is the first major push toward a “content licensing” model for AI training. If this sticks, we could see a new revenue stream for content-heavy clients and a reckoning for AI firms relying on free scraping. And I included their Orange Meets tech not because it’s useful now – it’s a prototype, not a Zoom replacement, but because Cloudflare is inching toward being a privacy-first collaboration platform enabler. If this matures, MSPs could eventually have open-source video options for regulated clients wary of US-based platforms.